


The Deaths and Lives of Shrike

by MrProphet



Category: Mortal Engines Series - Philip Reeve
Genre: Body Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 23:04:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10707009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet
Summary: Also featuring the Death of Discworld





	1. Reanimated

The soldier looks up and sees the medic standing over him. He tries to lift his hand, to call out, but it seems that all he can do is see and hear, and feel the pain of his injuries. The medic calls his name, but he can not answer.

“Nothing we can do for him,” the medic says, drawing out a small syringe. “Just put him out of his misery.”

“No.” The new voice is cold; not cold like ice, but cold like shining blue steel on a frosty morning.

“But sir; there is no saving him.”

“No.” This time the voice is agreeing with the medic. “He can not be saved, but he can still serve. He has a strong mind and a strong spirit.”

“Of course, sir,” the medic acknowledges reluctantly. He puts away his syringe and takes another from the unseen man. The contents of the first syringe had been clear; this one is filled with a lurid, green fluid.

The needle presses into the soldier’s arm and blessed numbness spreads through him.

*

Vision is gone now, only hearing remains, and the soldier does not much care for what he hears.

“The brain is dying,” the cold voice is explaining. “Most of the peripheral nervous system and organs are already defunct, preserved by the serum and the external machines.”

“His eyes still move.” Another new voice, a woman’s voice, but as cold as his escort’s. “He’s strong. He’ll do well with us.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Then let’s get him on the slab.”

He is lifted then and laid upon a cold, hard surface. He is dimly aware of his limbs being secured, and of a needle being inserted into his arm. Once more, the numbness spreads, but his consciousness does not fade.

“Insert the wires,” the woman instructed, “and prepare his armour.”

The soldier feels  _something_  infiltrating his flesh, burrowing into him and scraping against his bones. Then there comes the drilling, and the cutting, and the grinding and snapping and popping and humming of the sockets and screws and rivets and electrical current which are forced into him.

Vision returns; filtered, green-tinted and artificial, but as sharp as ever.

“Can you move?” It is the woman. She stands in front of him now, dressed in a black surgical gown embossed on the left breast with the logo of a tombstone, cracked down the centre. A tall man in a black coat, bearing the same logo, stands beside her, and the soldier knows that this is the man who brought him here.

“YES,” he replies, but the unfamiliar voice – rough and grating, like a steel sheet being torn in two – barely feels like his own. He rises to his feet and knows that he is taller than he had been; taller and stronger.

“What is your name?” the man asks.

“I…” He thinks back, but there is nothing in his memory save his journey from the field and waking in this place.

The man nods, satisfied. “You are Resurrected Man 5H8\K3 of the Lazarus Brigade,” he explains, and as he speaks a digital image of this designation plays across the soldier’s augmented vision. “You will henceforth respond only to this designation and obey all orders issued by officers of the Brigade. Do you understand.”

“I UNDERSTAND,” the Stalker replies.

“Repeat your designation,” the woman orders.

Again, the designation flickers across his view: 5H8\K3. The Stalker pauses.

“Give your designation,” the woman repeats.

The Stalker answers: “I AM… SHRIKE.”


	2. No Man's Land

“Sir! We have movement in the cloud,” the scan-trooper announced. His voice echoed flatly under the electrode-lined helmet which encased his head, feeding the input from the brigade’s sensor batteries directly to his brain.

“Impossible,” his commandant insisted. “That cloud’s hotter’n hell.”

“Four-twenty irrads,” the scan-trooper confirmed. “Multiple movement signals at nine hundred mets and closing. Looks like infantry.”

“But that’s…” The commandant shook his head.

“Sir; should we ready weapons?” another trooper asked.

“Nothing could come through that except cockroaches,” the commandant insisted. “Still…”

“Seven hundred mets and closing.”

“What? But that’s… Nothing on foot is that fast. Alright, signal to arms trooper. Charge the Tesla guns, gauss rifles primed; cycle the rad-pulses and discharge at one thousand irrads. That should be enough to cook even a roach.”

“Five hundred mets,” the scan-trooper cautioned.

Fear gripped the commandant’s heart; that was barely two hundred mets from the edge of the cloud. “Volley fire, all weapons,” he ordered.

The Tesla guns fired first, sending twisting electrical charges into the cloud, their hard fire spreading like frost patterns on a window through the ionised atmosphere. Thunder boomed across the trench in the wake of this artificial lightning, crashing on the helmet baffles of the Southern Cross troopers. 

The guns kept firing, each tower discharging its lethal current every five or six seconds, as the troopers began firing with their gauss rifles. A hail of tiny projectiles, driven at incomprehensible speeds, cut into the cloud, dragging the dust in their wake and actually pushing the edges of the cloud back. Finally, the rad-pulses fired. Lethal radiation poured from their focusing cones, heating the dust particles to a bright, cherry red.

“Cease fire!” the commandant called. “Scan?”

“Scope’s jammed,” the scan-trooper told him. “Clearing now.”

The commandant fretted as he waited for the distortion from the troop’s weapons-fire to clear from the scanners. Nothing could have survived the volley, but then nothing should have been in the cloud in the first place. The rad-cloud, regularly refreshed by pulses from one side or other, had stood as a permanent border between the territories held by the Council of the Southern Cross and the Great Steppes Hegemony for almost a decade. They called it no man’s land for a reason; because no man, or woman, could possibly live there.

The thought that anything could come out of that cloud…

“Movement at three hundred mets,” the scan-trooper announced, just as the unthinkable happened. The dust cloud parted and something emerged.

“Who are they?” The question was asked up and down the line.

At first sight they looked like armoured troopers, but even if it had been possible for anything human to walk out of the cloud, they were too tall, and too thin. Their torsos were broad and powerful, their arms and legs sturdy, but by no means wide enough to contain a strong body within that blackened armour. And their eyes… huge, round, and glowing with a ghastly green light.

They advanced, fast but steady, long strides eating up the ground.

“Give fire!” the commandant bellowed in a panic. “Fire at will!”

The gauss rifles flickered; the carapaces of the approaching figures sparked and rang as the bullets ricocheted from the armour. Tesla discharges coiled around them and smoke rose from the ponchos which identified them as Great Steppes troopers, but none of them fell; they just stalked relentlessly forward.

“Comm-trooper!” the commandant barked. “Get command on the line! Tell them we need armoured support, now!” 

Now the attackers lifted their own gauss rifles and returned fire. Their shots were sporadic – their weapons were clearly less indestructible than the troopers themselves – but lethally accurate.

“First armoured are on their way,” the comm.-trooper reported. “ETA…” She broke off with a short, sharp cry, as a gauss bullet turned her neck into bloody shreds and smashed her transmitter rig to pieces.

The commandant stared in horror; nearly a quarter of his troop had fallen, and none of the enemy. “Mines!” he ordered. “Fire the deadline!”

Thankfully, someone at the detonator controls was still alive. With a colossal roar, the buried explosive charges sent a plume of dirt thirty feet into the air, momentarily blotting out the sight of the attackers.

“Stand firm!” the commandant insisted. “Weapons ready.”

As the dust settled, the enemy came on; more slowly, perhaps, but just as inexorably. Their armour was cracked and battered, but the commandant did not think that any of them were down.

“Fire!” the commandant screamed. “Keep your heads down! Medics, clear out the wounded.”

The Tesla guns fired again and this time, some of the coiling electrical energy found its way through broken armour and a few of the enemy warriors fell.

“Keep it up!” the commandant cried. “They’re falling! The tanks are on their…”

The first of the enemy troopers dropped into the trench and the commandant got his first good look at  _it_. Seven feet tall and lean, its body was not clad in armour so much as made from it, but it did not move with the awkwardness of the many robot soldiers which had failed to perform on the battlefield. Its rifle – a huge, awkward weapon built for those huge hands – had been twisted by the Tesla discharge, but even as it landed in the trench it reached out with one of those hands.

The scan-trooper’s head, helmet and all, fell from his shoulders, severed by a handful of razor sharp claws.

Behind the thing, another dropped into the trench and sliced two more troopers open. The second was different from the first; still with the same metal body, but a little shorter and somehow feminine in form and motion. It was that difference that told the commandant that these things, these engines of death, were not human, but that they had been, once upon a time.

With a rush, the first of the tanks flew over the trench, gauss cannons blazing. For a moment, the commandant thought that the day was saved, but then the woman-thing leaped up, catching one of the passing tanks with her claws and slicing into the armoured plates of its side. As the tank rushed on, he saw the thing slice open the hatch and dive inside; a moment later, the tank crashed into the blasted plain of no-man’s land. Across that plain, the things were tearing at the tank, ripping them open and throwing them down amid the rare remains of their few fallen comrades.

“No man’s land,” he said with a sickly laugh. He turned to face the first thing, which mow stood alone amid the gruesome remains of the troop. “But whose is it? What are you?”

“I AM SHRIKE,” the thing replied dully.

The commandant managed to fire his pistol once before the Stalker’s claws split open his chest.


	3. Shrike II

He feels the icy, burning pain of the Tesla beams rips through him. Around him, the Lazarus Brigade stand, awkward and immobile; like him, they are confused. Too many enemies, on too many fronts, with too few distinguishing features: One hundred battle wagons, two coils and a 30mm gauss rifle each; all brand new and crewed by élite troops trained to as near-identical a level of skill as was possible with human crews; no variation in threat levels, no priority of attack, no orders; whatever distinctions there were, were washed-out by the haze of the Tesla beams.

Of course, it is to be expected when those who attack the Lazarus Brigade are those who had created them.

He never knows why the creators turned against their Stalkers. He never knows that, in the wake of the war, they decided that the Stalkers were not something that they wished to have around.

He knows nothing at all until he wakes. He doesn't even know that time has passed. He does know, however, that he is different; that things have changed. 

He is in a different place; a laboratory, small but compact. There are other Stalkers here, but they are no part of his Brigade.

His body is different; his left leg is not a part of his original frame and the right arm below the elbow is a newer, cruder model, its extra weight offset by a reinforced shoulder piece. 

His mind also is changed. Something in the part of him that once lived is different; his thoughts are the same, but he thinks them in different ways. Something in the part of him that never lived is also changed; instructions and priorities reordered.

The woman leaning over him is like the medics and technicians who first made him, and yet unlike. She has much of their coolness, but not their coldness. Neither does she have their almost-inhuman sterility; her hair is long, her face expressive. Her skin is mottled; pale with dark patches on the throat and beside the ear.

He is awake as she etches something on his brow, where he can not see it, but he does not move until later. It is only when they give him orders that he learns that they have, by some chance, given him back his name.

They have called him Shrike again.


	4. Requiem for a Survivor

Seasons pass, snow falls; the Stalker Shrike survives. He always survives. Deep in hibernation, the seasons pass like the hours in a day, the sun flickering across the sky.

Suddenly, the sun stands still; snow hangs in the air.

“SO,” Shrike says. “IT IS THAT TIME AGAIN.”

YES. The skeletal figure stalks over to stand in front of Shrike. IT IS THAT TIME.

Shrike raises his head. The joints of his neck are stiff with the accumulated dust and corrosion of centuries. “I NEVER KNOW,” he admits. “IF I AM DOING THIS SLOWLY, OR FAST. ITSEEMS TO TAKE SO LONG, BUT THE SNOW DOESN’T FALL WHILE I’M DOING IT.” At last, his burning green eyes meet the sapphire stars which flare within the sockets of Death’s skull and hold them, as no mortal ever could. “WHICH IS IT?” he asks. “SLOW, OR FAST.”

Death thinks for a moment before answering. YES.

“I SEE.”

YOU KNOW WHY I AM HERE?

“I KNOW,” Shrike agrees, “BUT I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. I AM NOT DEAD.”

TRUE, Death allowed, BUT YOU ARE CLOSE, AND OF COURSE YOU HAVE DIED BEFORE. TWICE, IN FACT. ONCE UPON THE OPERATING TABLE OF THE LAZARUS BRIGADE AND ONCE UPON THE WORD OF TOM NATSWORTHY. SO YOU SEE, YOUR CASE AS A WHOLE IS MOST IRREGULAR.

“I APOLOGISE IF I HAVE GIVEN ANY TROUBLE.”

FORTUNATELY I AM MORE OR LESS MY OWN BOSS. I HAVE LITTLE PAPERWORK TO CONCERN ME. ONTOLOGICAL INERTIA HAS LITTLE NEED FOR VALIDATION.

Shrike gives a slow, grinding nod.

THEREFORE, I AM HERE TO OFFER YOU A CHOICE, Death explained. YOU MAY CHOOSE TO DIE.

“I SEE,” Shrike acknowledges. “AND IF I CHOOSE  _NOT_  TO DIE?”

THEN WE HAVE NO BUSINESS TOGETHER, Death assured him. I DO NOT KILL.

With a shriek of rusted joints, Shrike lifts his arm to point at a low mound not far from him. “WHAT ABOUT THEM?” he asks. “ARE THEY REMEMBERED?”

Death turns and looks at the mound. A thorn bush grows across the mound, and despite the cold weather a single, dark flower is blooming on its branches. IT HAS BEEN MANY YEARS, he said.

“ARE THEY FORGOTTEN THEN?”

ODIN IS REMEMBERED. THE TRAKTIONSTADTSGESELLSCHAFT AND THE GREEN STORM, AND THE WAR BETWEEN THEM ARE REMEMBERED.

THEIR NAMES ARE NOT SPOKEN, HOWEVER, Death replies. WHEN I AM DONE HERE, HOWEVER, I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT WITH ONE OF THEIRS. A GREAT-GRANDMOTHER OF EIGHTY-NINE. I HAVE GATEHRED THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN AND DESCENDENTS WITHOUT NUMBER ACROSS EVERY CONTINENT OF THE WORLD, he goes on. IN THAT WAY, THEY WILL LIVE AS LONG AS THEIR RACE SURVIVES.

“BUT THE RACE SURVIVES ONLY BECAUSE OF THEM,” Shrike argues. “THAT OUGHT NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN.”

Death turns his head thoughtfully. IT IS NOT  _ONLY_  BECAUSE OF THEM THAT HUMANITY SURVIVES. THERE HAVE BEEN… MANY OTHER NEAR EXTINCTIONS. HOWEVER, YOU ARE CORRECT THAT  _HERE_  THEY SAVED THE WORLD.

He pauses. IF IT HELPS, I SHALL ALWAYS REMEMBER THEM. I REMEMBER EVERYONE.

Shrike shakes his head. “THEY MUST BE REMEMBERED. ALL OF THEM. TOM NATSWORTHY.WREN NATSWORTHY. THEO NGONI. OENONE ZERO. ANNA FANG. He hesitates for a moment before adding: “HESTHER SHAW.”

Very deliberately, he settles back into his original posture. “I WILL STAY,” he decides, “AND REMEMBER.”

VERY WELL, Death agrees. WE MAY MEET AGAIN.

“I WILL NOT CHANGE MY MIND,” Shrike assures him. 

NONETHELESS, YOU DESERVE THE CHOICE.

“THANK YOU FOR THAT,” Shrike says. “I HAVE NOT OFTEN BEEN GIVEN A…”

He stops, realising that Death has departed. The snow begins to fall and the sun resumes its course, and Shrike sleeps on.

Surviving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also featuring the Death of Discworld


End file.
